


More Loudly Than The Sword

by Antihelen



Category: Justified
Genre: M/M, Scars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-09
Updated: 2014-02-09
Packaged: 2018-01-11 18:22:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,052
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1176362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Antihelen/pseuds/Antihelen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Raylan, Tim and scars (the story of a life, white tissue words written on skin).</p>
            </blockquote>





	More Loudly Than The Sword

**Author's Note:**

> “Scars speak more loudly than the sword that caused them.” – Paulo Coelho.
> 
> This is about Tim, and Raylan, and living with the past whether it’s your own or someone else’s.

Raylan grew up in Harlan and he’s got the scars to show for it. The better part of two decades in the Marshals Service has only added to the collection.

Some are easy to understand. There’s the bullet wound on his calf and the tiny nick by his eyebrow, unnoticeable unless you’re close enough to kiss or to hit (it’s Raylan) and the result of a high school baseball game (it’s Harlan).

Others you’d never guess to look at. The mark on his forearm was courtesy of a godforsaken skunk of all things, uppity when Raylan stumbled on it the wrong side of a bottle of Mags’ apple pie. Boyd nearly did himself in with laughing, an easier warmth to the sound back in those days, and he tried to clean it with a douse of the last of the moonshine. Of course, the sticky result only served to attract the bloated flies already lazily circling in the summer heat and the whole thing was a worse mess than before they started. 

The final few, well, those he’d only ever recall late at night when the whiskey had burned its way down his throat and along his veins, loosened his memories and his lips and his ease with remembering. 

He can count on one hand the people who know the stories behind all those scars (Winona’s not one of them, and were he the type Raylan could turn himself crazy wondering on that).

Tim, though.

Tim is the patchwork man made whole again, Humpty Dumpty holding himself together. If a scar tells a story then Tim has a goddamn epic writ across his skin, chapters recreated in lines and burns and missing spaces, sentences carved into and words torn out of every other inch.

Raylan learns each letter with eyes and fingers and mouth, reads and repeats and could turn the pages for a thousand nights (and a thousand more after that, and for as long as Tim might let him).

He can recall every mark on Tim’s skin, knows them by heart because he’s found himself storing them in his own (didn’t know he was doing it ‘til he’d already started and it was too late to stop), carefully placed there one by one like the doing could take the pain from Tim’s own body (it can’t, of course, but Raylan still tries).

He’ll ask with his thumb tracing a thin stripe that curves over Tim’s shoulder, hard enough to form a question but light enough that it doesn’t make itself a demand, because that’s the way it is with Tim. Orders from his higher ups and requests from everyone else because ask and he might snip and grouse but he’ll always help, but try and force him and it’s like that steel spine of his was fused to the ground for all the luck you’d have in moving him.

Raylan will follow that scar as it fades into the plane of Tim’s back like it’s disappearing inside him and sometimes Tim will tell him and sometimes he won’t.

This is one place where Raylan has learnt not to push, where fussing at it will only lead to Tim retreating, wary for days until Raylan can coax him back because Tim doesn’t always know to recognise caring when it’s pointed in his direction, can’t always handle it even when he does.

So Raylan will ask, an offering to listen gentler than he’s used to giving (and he wants to, most every time, and that should have clued Raylan in long before it does).

Even when Tim does explain he doesn’t always get the full story, just a who or a how or a where. Sometimes it’s with their bodies still curved together, failing at cooling down because they’re close enough to be sharing heat, with Tim looking at the scar or Raylan’s hand or the wall, but never directly at Raylan, not when it’s one of the important ones. Others it’ll be days later and Tim just starts talking, each word distinct and disjointed like he’s tossing grenades, continuing a conversation that never began out loud.

Raylan’s getting better though (getting to know Tim better) at finding the balance between supporting and smothering because Raylan’s not always great at the first and nothing will make Tim pull back faster than too much of the second (you have to be sneaky giving kindness to Tim, but Raylan’s always been wily and he’s got incentive). 

Raylan’s fingers will graze Tim’s neck or card through his hair and mess it up until it’s loose and making him look all of twelve years old. Tim will huff into his shoulder, playing at exasperated but not stopping him. 

Some nights he’ll pull Tim in close close close, tie them up until they’re two bodies in one space and if Tim were trembling Raylan would be able to feel the tremors through his own skin, but Tim doesn’t shake (he never does: the army honed that ability for stillness until it was just as much a weapon as anything else) and Raylan feels the absence in the same way he would its presence. 

(And that type of near is okay but Raylan’s weight on top of Tim is not, not for long – there’s something in Tim, the part that keeps close the lessons his daddy and war maybe never meant to teach but that he learnt anyway, that needs an exit point even if he doesn’t plan on wanting (needing) (using) it – and Raylan (and Tim) learnt that one the hard way).

Still though, there are occasions where the one thing Tim really does need is space and Raylan’s learning to figure those times out too. They’re the worst, not least because a beer later and Tim will turn to him all placid eyes and nothing-to-see-here in a way you’d never know there was something wrong if you hadn’t witnessed it, like he hadn’t just torn the wounds open again, pulled his own heart out for viewing and taken Raylan’s along with it.

Raylan wants to open each scar, clean it out and sew it back up so it disappears from view, one less thing for Tim to remember even though he can never forget.

He can’t do that, though, thinks even if he could Tim wouldn’t let him.

What he can do is learn them, how they were created and how they feel under his fingertips (it’s a history of Tim mapped out on the terrain of his own skin, only someone forgot to include the legend), try to teach their owner that he cares about the stories not for their own sake but for their connection to Tim.

Sometimes Tim believes him, others Raylan’s fingers will twitch for his holster and he’ll want to hunt down every person that ever made Tim feel that he wasn’t worth this (worth more, because god knows he deserves better than Raylan can give) and teach them a lesson of their own. Tim’s all cool and calm and quiet competence, the guy who gives as good as he gets without breaking a sweat and then a little bit more just because he can, but sometimes he looks at Raylan like he can’t understand why he would stick around.

(He’s the guy who made an apricot shot at eight hundred metres in the middle of a Kentucky storm and it all going to shit at the other end of his earpiece, rescued two kittens on his way home when he heard their wet mewls behind a dust bin and kept them in Art’s office for a week while he worked).

There’s a scar on his foot: stood on some glass, Tim told him the first time, but later – months later and Raylan’s still there – he tells him again, stood on some glass because his daddy was bitter and drunk (and Tim’s long forgotten which came first - no need to hum because Raylan recognises that tune -) and threw a bottle at him, and Tim had to clean it up because his mom was long gone and his daddy had never been one to tidy his own messes. Tim missed a piece and sliced his foot open because he wasn’t wearing shoes and he was nine years old.

Tim hates Raylan touching it but that’s because Tim’s ticklish there. The first time Raylan tried to press his lips to it Tim kicked him in the face and almost broke his nose. Raylan had a black eye for a week, had to make noises about a bar fight and duck Art’s disapproving little frowns ( _I thought you were settling, Raylan,_ he wouldn’t say and Raylan couldn’t not answer back _I am_ ).

It was worth it though for the look that had painted itself on Tim’s face (open emotion and Raylan’s the one who gets to see Tim like this, the one Tim lets see) and because when Raylan had started swearing, then smiling, Tim had crawled down the bed to frame Raylan’s face in those clever hands of his and kiss him, whisper _it was your own fool fault_ , and, _I thought you had good reflexes_ , laughter on his lips and working its way into Raylan’s mouth where it danced with his own.

Looking back, Raylan suspects this is when he began to fall in love (he doesn’t tell Tim yet).

There’s the still fading graze of shotgun pellets dotting his arm, a story recent and public enough that Raylan can get most of it at the office, and a patchwork on his abdomen that Tim hasn’t talked about but when Raylan kisses it, tastes like sand.

Not all of Tim’s scars are on his skin. It’s the way of the world, and Tim’s world more than most. Habits, compulsions, aversions, everyone has their own list and Tim’s no different. It took time before Raylan realised that Tim’s sleeping habits were just one from his, that Tim’s frequent absences from bed weren’t due to Raylan’s presence in it.

Seven, eight nights in ten it’s fine, he’ll wake up with Tim in arm’s reach (or in his arms because Raylan runs warm and Tim’s a heat seeking missile in sleep) or, more often, there’ll be no Tim but when Raylan looks across the numbers on the clock will show six thirty has been and gone.

Most of those days he’ll be up by the time Tim gets back from his run (and maybe Raylan’s just growing soft in the head where Tim’s concerned, but the bed’s never so appealing when he’s falling back asleep without Tim there in it) and Tim will duck his head a little or turn away but Raylan will still see the half hidden smile, sweet in a way Tim can’t shake.

If Raylan’s already showered Tim will slope in close, press his body to Raylan’s and get his sweat on him, because Tim’s a lot of things and at the end of the day one of those things is a bit of a dick (Raylan’s fond and annoyed in equal measure, story of his life).

It’s the other times that aren’t okay.

Tim always tries to not wake Raylan and when Raylan comes to in a cold (cooling) (still warm) bed he’ll find Tim curled up on the couch with a cat pressed to his legs and the TV on mute (and sometimes a glass but usually not – Tim might use alcohol to stop the nightmares in the first place but most of the time he knows better than to think drinking can wash them away once they’re there) or dozing on the swinging bench his old CO helped him put up on the front porch.

The worst ones of all are, thank the lord (not that Tim’s believed in one of those a long time), also the rarest. They’re awful, painful, ugly things and Tim will never make a single. fucking. noise.

Raylan heard once that you shouldn’t wake a person from a nightmare. He supposes it makes sense in a sideways sort of way, but Raylan’s not always great at listening to others and the first time he was confronted by Tim like this that piece of advice wasn’t one Raylan even thought about.

Tim had reacted – not well.

(He was his usual self at the office, lured away for a couple of days to mix up an SOG training exercise, bargaining with Rachel to do a coffee run down the road and conducting a stealth raid on the stationery cupboard to build a jenga tower out of pens - it turned out to be unexpectedly reliable, right up until someone put one too many files on top of it and the whole thing can crashing down in a clatteringly mournful landslide of highlighters and erasers (Art shut his office door and went back to ignoring them).

When it was just them, though, Tim was quietly unhappy, too careful with his hands, and he refused to let Raylan in until Raylan could remind Tim that he wasn’t that fragile either.)

So all he can do is lie there, not touching because Tim will have long since twisted himself to the side of the bed, totally fucking useless (and Raylan’s never been good with that feeling). It’s still worse to think of all the times Tim must have gone through this alone, woken up with the sounds of his dreams tracking him into consciousness and not even the breathing of a body beside him to anchor him back to this side of reality.

On it will go, time stretched out so every second feels like a minute, until something snaps Tim out of it. Problem is, no one’s ever told Raylan what to do when the nightmare’s done, and anyway, this is Tim and if everyone else were turning left he’d already be bent right and half way to the horizon.

So he stays very still and very quiet until Tim makes some movement of his own, even if all Raylan wants to do is cover the distance of that no man’s land between them and pull Tim back, wrap around him like a flak jacket.

Tim won’t sleep after that, will go for a shower as though the water can wash away the lingering recollections (stays under there ‘til he feels like he’s drowning, ‘til he feels alive) or take himself for a run even if it’s three o’clock in the morning and his muscles are already stiff from being held so tight.

The worst of it is the way he gets afterwards, like it’s an embarrassment, or an imposition, or something else that Raylan can’t pin down yet but he knows it’s not good.

Raylan has seen the statistics, how many soldiers fall apart when they get back home without the order and the routine and their unit (and the terror and the boredom and the meaning, they don’t add) to keep them together, and Tim who’s so goddamned tough, so level headed, that he lived the past visible on his skin, who came through two war zones and still goes out and does what he does every single day, feels torn open by this intimacy.

At least he lets Raylan be there now, though, and that’s something (it’s Tim: it’s a lot). Tim gets – off, uncertain – if Raylan rises with him, just doesn’t occur to him to see it through anything other than on his own, so when Tim does his thing Raylan will pretend to go back to sleep (he doesn’t).

Raylan will be up earlier than usual, an unspoken compromise (it’s slow going but they’re getting better at those, too). They’ll sit there in the dawn quiet while Tim busies himself with the cats twining about his feet, Fenrir clamouring for food because he’s _too dumb to catch his own breakfast, Tim – shut up, Raylan_ and Loki trying to scale Tim’s leg like she’s not three times too big to do so now, and Raylan fixes them both the tea that Tim keeps for the days that coffee’s not a good way to start. 

Some mornings Tim will let Raylan’s fingers graze his as he passes him his cup (others he’s still too raw).

Tim’s scars don’t mean he’s broken. They show his strength, and his stubbornness, and all the times he’s come through the other side because it’s not in him to do anything else. For all the pain in their making in a way Raylan will always love them for that.

He loves Tim for that. 

One day, when Tim’s ready, he’ll tell him. Raylan doesn’t always get things right – too much or too little or just in the wrong damn direction – but Tim, Tim lets him try, and get it wrong, and try again and he doesn’t even realise what Raylan would do for him.

Until then, Raylan will show him. He’ll do it with a kiss pressed to the small of his back, or the brush of a thumb across his cheek, because Tim’s not used to this casual affection (he goes still when Raylan does it, like he’s missed the joke but is still waiting for the punch line) so Raylan will continue ‘til Tim’s no longer surprised and then he’ll carry on because he wants to.

He’ll think it every time they fuss about who’s going to drive and Raylan makes sure to win on the days that the bags under Tim’s eyes are a little starker than usual, when he’s a little too focused, and even if Tim won’t sleep in the passenger seat he can flick through the file he’ll have already read, give Raylan the potted highlights in a tone of voice that makes clear he doesn’t believe Raylan’s done the same (he’s usually right) and complain about his music.

He’ll promise it with every scar he touches, and learns, and remembers, when he listens to all the things Tim does say and all the things he doesn’t (can’t) (won’t). 

Even if he can’t protect Tim from the past and sometimes even himself (because Tim’s sharp, and not only outwards, so sometimes he gets cut too), he can lay himself as bare as he’s ever been, let Tim map all the imperfections on his own body and tell him the story of every single one.


End file.
